One Piece Creator On Drawing Boobs

Eiichiro Oda, workaholic and One Piece creator, was asked how to draw the curvy bodies of the characters in his famed manga and anime.
As noted on 2ch, the first question, actually, was whether or not Nico Robin's first name, Nico, explicitly meant "ニ個" (literally, "niko", or here "two round spheres"), because of her breasts. Oda replied no.

[Image: 2ch]
Continuing in this line of questions, the next question asked Oda how he drew the One Piece women. He replied, "The women's proportions are three circles and one X. Please think and draw this way."

Oda, however, added words of caution, saying that if you draw these body types a bunch, it's necessary to be prepared to receive critical letters from women readers. Fair enough!

In One Piece, the body types — men and women — are exaggerated and overblown. They're physical hyperboles. So, those criticisms, warranted or not, don't address what keeps readers coming back, which is how the characters interact and the stories that Oda tells.

It's odd, female One Piece characters don't feel creepy to me the same way other huge chested anime characters do. I know in theory the way he draws them should set off all the usual sleaze alarms but it's strangely consistent with the way everything else looks.
I'm not denying that Nico Robin is 90% cleavage or suggesting that because male characters show skin all allegations of sexist behaviour are negated, it's just that the entire world has this warped sense of proportion about it that's coupled with a tropical theme. The way the show messes with sizes and shapes of just about everything feels sort of natural.

It probably helps a ton that every character in One Piece has character and almost immediately either throws aside, or completely owns their wacky looks. Also helpful is that every perverted detail or moment is so heavily signposted with Looney-Toons style bulging eyes and lolling tongues or hearts in the eyes.

Nami and Robin are not just attractive, they're as fun as every other cast member.

I think it helps that there is basically no romance between any of the crew.

So those ladies are not throwing themselves at people and are genuinely interesting characters, rather then in some anime where the overblown lady appears to have nothing except her love for whatever mc is the trope of the week.

I agree. Although at this point I don't think it'll matter. If one of the girls gets into a romance right now it still wont change the fact that the crews friendship is the strongest binding force of all.

I think it's because One Piece is overtly cartoony and embraces it with gusto. When you take abstraction to a certain point, an easily recognisable or iconic female figure is indeed two circles and an X (narrow waist, wide hips). One Piece is not trying to say "this is how women should look", but rather, "this is how a voluptuous woman looks when cartoonised". That's why his archetypical "tank" males are a big triangle of a shoulder-chest with a tiny rectangle of hips-legs, "stocky" characters are, literally, squares and so on.

It has always pissed me off that the makers of Bishoujo Liara T'Soni were bullied into reducing her breast size, when Liara's in-game breasts are enormous. They were obviously doing a reproduction of the in-game figure, but people accused them of over-sizing Liara's tits.

Only logged in users may vote for comments!

Get Permalink

Trending Stories Right Now

Today, how you feel about panty shots can determine how you feel about anime as a whole. And it's not just panty shots. In the blockbuster anime Food Wars, women's clothes burst off their bodies when they taste an exquisite bite of steak. Skirts often don't cover the bottom halves of women's butts in Prison School. Breasts are regularly the first body part to enter a shot in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?. In the West, the practice of lacing gratuitous sexuality -- and especially female sexuality -- into an anime is known as "fan service". Love it or hate it, anime studios have made a conscious effort to feature "fan service" in most of this year's Western-subbed anime titles.

Why buy games on day one any more? A newly planned set of updates for Final Fantasy 15 won't just fix bugs, they will add story cutscenes and improve the game's slow-paced 13th chapter by adding more powers to Noctis's repertoire.